Pile Migration :::: chapter two, page 7

the following chapter). Capitalism is stealing piles, owner-less shapes of outgrowth, and co-opting them for their own purposes – to sell more products. There are several everyday examples of this – the toolbox, the dresser drawer, the cardboard box, the skyscraper, the public school system, ATM cards, etc.

One of capitalism's great strengths is its ability to coerce decency with the camouflage of progress and inevitability. The seeming inevitability of capitalism is all a clever marketing campaign. The failure of communism provided the mass spectacle to distract the public from the faults and impermanence of capitalism. Piles are not undesirable manifestations of inevitable entropy. Sure, excess is cause for concern as regards anything we encounter, but capitalism's attempts to subvert the piles of its own excess is an inexcusable corruption of the pile.

Piles are a tangled mess of inefficiency in the eyes most capitalists. The global economy today is fueled by a bureaucratic order that has no space for the wandering pile. Despite the revulsion that capitalist practitioners may find in piles, they cannot escape creating more. This is one of capitalism's most unavoidable afflictions. The concept of too much is not in the capitalist's dictionary, only the concept of more. This unfortunate psychological corruption prevents thinking that could limit production, even if it would produce beneficial results.

This is capitalism's problem. And we mean to exploit it. Capitalist ideology, if not embarrassed by the abundance of piles it leaves in its wake, certainly doesn't enjoy advertising them.

Capitalism tries to subvert and hide the pile away in drawers or containers. This has led to an outbreak of stack-based architecture and stack-based thinking in the past two-hundred years. By converting piles into stacks, capitalists are under the impression they are helping to order or tidy up the natural world. The industrial exhaust (energy) dispersed in the making of a sky-scraper is proof to the contrary.

Piles don't belong to capitalism. They are natural environmental occurrences. As such, they belong to all of us, the way shade from an apple tree is improprietary. Capitalism has no right to transform natural landscapes into stacks without the compliance of the public. While capitalism often does just this with rivers, lakes, forests and meadows, we have the direct power to stop capitalism's corruption of the pile. Piles, unlike lakes and forests, can be migrated quickly and cheaply without any loss of integrity to the pile.

By bringing the “embarrassing” piles of capitalism to full visibility, our intent is to stimulate a change in our society and the world economy that it has spawned. Capitalism tries to hide its piles off in the corner waste-bin of a 50-story skyscraper. Fine, we will move them to the forefront of conversation. If we get people talking about piles, we get people talking about capitalism. Talking about capitalism in pile terminology will melt the illusion of inevitability that capitalism purports.

Our aim is to reclaim the pile, any pile. The muscle required to transfer the mass of a pile from one coordinate to another, we acknowledge, is not what is going to topple international trade

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